A commentary on digital photography news and practice based on my ongoing photo magazine coverage of the industry and photographer community since 1975.

Friday, November 28, 2008

Black Friday

Last night after Thanksgiving I tuned into the news and caught an ad that really grabbed me. A local retailer was offering a major brand 8 megapixel point and shoot digital camera for $88, that’s $11 a megapixel! That really lowers the bar for anyone who wants a digital camera.

But I suspect the advertising offer was to lure people into the store at some unholy hour of the morning, really early and after eating too much turkey too!

Then on the news Thursday night there were pictures of people lined up already waiting for the stores to open wanting to be the first to get in to pick off the choice bargains. There were also other lines of people on video earlier in the day of those queued up in longer lines than ever to obtain a free Thanksgiving dinner. The too kinds of lining up in a single news broadcast had a disparate visual dissonance because although the purposes were worlds apart, the people did not look that different. In other words people that look like just about any other American in a crowd are lining up to spend money while others are lined up because they don’t have the price of a meal. This is a very different “hard times” from the Depression era photo’s we saw from the 30’s.

Speaking of which there is now access to much of Life Magazine’s photo archives that have been scanned and made available on Google. Anyone interested in history in photo’s, photo-journalism, or just great photography, it is all there in the images from the Life Magazine archives including the photos from the Depression like those made by Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans.